Thursday, January 13, 2011

Often, what ought to have been obvious from the start, only appears so when it is illustrated by personal experience. For instance, that getting along in a society based on unarticulated - unconscious, irrational - norms, is incompatible with the use of a drug which tends to erode the ability to comply with these norms. I remember my colleague X, in all seriousness, asking another colleague, who had attended drama school, whether academic drama didn't tend to include "impressions" of Woody Woodpecker, and Porky Pig, fixed into the text as "radiating singularities":

the-uh uh-uh-the-uh uh-the-uh th-that's all folks,

such extravagencies being undoubtedly authorised by the currently fashionable texts of Deleuze and Guattari, if these texts were taken completely seriously; that is, if the spirit of modern philosophy were allowed to become unmoored from its bureaucratic civil structure, like a tarpaulin torn from its fixtures by a gust of wind, or a stray binliner, suddenly rearing up to its full height.